I've been using proxmox in my homelab for ~2y, and was doing everything bare metal for the ~3y prior to that (which is when I started my homelab). At this poin

I've been using proxmox in my homelab for ~2y, and was doing everything bare metal for the ~3y prior to that (which is when I started my homelab). At this point, I'd never use anything else. Proxmox "just works" in the best sense of the phrase. Never had uptime issues or anything (knock on wood). The only bare-metal install at this point is my plex server, which has a special level of importance in my close and extended family, so I baby it a little bit. A lotta bit. I use it for a lot of things - a windows VM for running the mega client (so it's always on + isn't on a personal machine to snoop around), a postgres server that I use for the dev/qa versions of my personal stuff, a jenkins+wekan server, a vm just for minecraft servers, etc etc. It's so easy to just spin up a new VM when I need a clean slate for something random. If I at some point actually start my own business, we'd be a proxmox shop for any non-cloud infra. And the cost-effectiveness of even a handful of 1-gen-old Dell servers on-prem (for things that don't need super high availability) is really hard to overstate when your budget isn't attached to VC funding. I would not run prod infra on-prem at this point, though: DigitalOcean makes the cloud far too affordable for that. But I'd probably have all CI, data analysis, etc etc local for a good long while. One gripe I have is their subscription/license nag. It's annoying and tacky. I would gripe less if they had an option that made it feasible for me, a guy running it in his basement with 0 profit motive, to buy a license. Right now, it'd be (~$85 * 2 sockets * 4 servers) for me. Sorry, that's not happening, I could actually use DigitalOcean cheaper than that (and maybe even AWS). And it would be a huge % of my house's tech-related OpEx (compare that to ~80/yr for domains, $5/mo for my one droplet, $100/mo for internet, etc). If I had to name a price, I'd say $25/yr would be about the most I'd drop (as a guy with a basement server room, of course). Contrast this with Plex which I got a lifetime license for for like 150 bucks or something, and plex doesn't even really have an alternative. I could live without proxmox (libvirt is really annoying, but not that annoying), but I couldn't live without plex. The pricing seems fine for businesses, though. I'd argue it's probably good RoI.